OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)– A large force of Israeli troops and border guards used violence at dawn Sunday to evacuate the Palestinian activists in the newly-established Bab Ashams village in east Jerusalem.

The Palestinian information center (PIC) reporter in occupied Jerusalem said that the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) brutally attacked the activists and detained many of them.

He added the detained Palestinian activists were taken in chain to Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank and the wounded were admitted to Ramallahhospital.

Several foreign activists and journalists were also arrested and physically assaulted.

The Israeli higher court issued a verdict yesterday preventing the Israeli army or the police from evacuating the sit-in tents of Bab Ashams village which was set up by Palestinian and foreign activists in area E1.

The raid on the camp was carried out at the behest of Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a statement issued by his office yesterday.

The statement read that Netanyahu gave instructions to immediately evacuate the Palestinians present in the area between Maale Adumim and Jerusalem.

It added that the Israeli government would ask the higher court to revoke its decision to delay the evacuation of the camp, but until then the area would be declared a closed military zone and all roads leading to it would be blocked.

Earlier, the Hamas Movement called on the activists in the camp of Bab Ashams village to resist any Israeli attempt to evacuate them by force.

In a press release on Saturday, Hamas condemned the Israeli threats to attack the camp and said such step would be a violation of the international law and held Israel fully responsible for the consequences of its actions.

In this regard, Palestinian lawmaker Hatem Qafisha told the PIC that the idea of Bab Ashams village has become one of the new popular resistance methods and must be supported by all Palestinian political forces.

“But I think that the Israeli occupation may have noticed this method quickly and already moved to suppress it through declaring the area closed militarily and confronting the activists,” MP Qafisha stated.

The lawmaker added that if such method was supported, there would be many areas in occupied Palestine like Bab Ashams village gaining national and international momentum.

He affirmed that many Palestinian areas need a similar village in order to protect them from the Israeli settlement activities.

The new village has been named after the epic novel Bab Ashams that was written by Lebanese writer Elias Khuri and means in English “the Gate of the Sun.”

As part of the popular resistance movement in Palestine, the village was inaugurated Friday on a piece of Palestinian land in east Jerusalem, in an area referred to by Israel as E1 and designated for the expansion of Maale Adumim settlement.

Bedouin families living in the area confirmed that they own the lands which Israel wants to annex and even showed deeds proving their ownership.

The intended E1 settlement project aims at linking the illegal Maale Adumim settlement with east Jerusalem, thus illegally appropriating Palestinian lands and blocking the geographical contiguity of the occupied West Bank.

This illegal Israeli project, which received wide international condemnation, would divide the West Bank into two parts and completely isolate it from east Jerusalem, an action that would kill any chance to establish a future Palestinian state.